The Drug War Devastated Black and Other Minority Communities. Is Marijuana Legalization Helping?
A major argument for legalizing the adult use of cannabis after 75 years of prohibition was to stop the harm caused by disproportionate enforcement of drug laws in Black, Latino and other minority communities. But efforts to help those most affected participate in the newly legal sector have been halting.
Lessons for Cities from Seattle’s Racial and Social Justice Law
Seattle is marking the first anniversary of its landmark Race and Social Justice Initiative ordinance. Signed into law in April 2023, the ordinance highlights race and racism because of the pervasive inequities experienced by people of color
Don’t Shoot Portland, University of Oregon Team Up for Black Narratives, Memory
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Grants Pass Anti-Camping Laws Head to Supreme Court
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Mt. Tabor Park Selected for National Initiative
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OHCS, BuildUp Oregon Launch Program to Expand Early Childhood Education Access Statewide
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Governor Kotek Announces Chief of Staff, New Office Leadership
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Governor Kotek Announces Investment in New CHIPS Child Care Fund
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Minnesota and other Democratic-led states lead pushback on censorship. They're banning the book ban
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US advances review of Nevada lithium mine amid concerns over endangered wildflower
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Missouri hires Memphis athletic director Laird Veatch for the same role with the Tigers
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KC Current owners announce plans for stadium district along the Kansas City riverfront
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Op-Ed: Why MAGA Policies Are Detrimental to Black Communities
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Gallup Finds Black Generational Divide on Affirmative Action
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OP-ED: Embracing Black Men’s Voices: Rebuilding Trust and Unity in the Democratic Party
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With graduation near, colleges seek to balance safety and students' right to protest Gaza war
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William Strickland, a longtime civil rights activist, scholar and friend of Malcolm X, has died
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Biden will speak at Morehouse commencement, an election-year spotlight in front of Black voters
ATLANTA (AP) — President Joe Biden will be the commencement speaker at Morehouse College in Georgia, giving the Democrat a key election-year spotlight on one of the nation’s preeminent historically Black campuses as he works to shore up the racially diverse coalition that propelled him to the...
What to stream this weekend: Conan O’Brien travels, 'Migration' soars and Taylor Swift reigns
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Music Review: Jazz pianist Fred Hersch creates subdued, lovely colors on 'Silent, Listening'
Jazz pianist Fred Hersch fully embraces the freedom that comes with improvisation on his solo album “Silent, Listening,” spontaneously composing and performing tunes that are often without melody, meter or form. Listening to them can be challenging and rewarding. The many-time...
Book Review: 'Nothing But the Bones' is a compelling noir novel at a breakneck pace
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Haiti health system nears collapse as medicine dwindles, gangs attack hospitals and ports stay shut
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Trump called this visa 'very bad' for Americans. Truth Social applied for one
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Moscow court rejects Evan Gershkovich's appeal, keeping him in jail until at least June 30
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2 Malaysian military helicopters collide and crash while training, killing all 10 crew
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In Vietnam, farmers reduce methane emissions by changing how they grow rice
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The US is expected to block aid to an Israeli military unit. What is Leahy law that it would cite?
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NEW YORK (AP) — Norman Lear, a show business legend and full-throated humanist, set out last spring to rent a modest apartment in the Bronx.
The landlord welcomed this incognito white man with a couple of offers.
Not so lucky was an African American man who had come to him the day before. The landlord, insisting nothing was available, brusquely turned that man away.
This undercover mission, as well as Lear's subsequent blowing the whistle on the landlord, was filmed for "America Divided," a star-driven, eye-opening probe into systemic inequality in the U.S. today not only in housing but also education, health care, labor, criminal justice and voting rights.
The five-week docuseries, which premiered Friday, September 30, 2016 at 9 p.m. EDT on Epix, employs the 94-year-old Lear (armed with a hidden camera) as one of its correspondents as well as an executive producer.
"I'm happy to have reached the 1 percent," said Lear, back in New York, where he spent part of his childhood, to shoot his report, "but I started as a kid in the Depression whose father was serving (prison) time. But what was wonderful about America was it offered me opportunity. And it promised that opportunity to everybody else, regardless of the color of their skin. After all these years, that promise has yet to be delivered on. I care about that."
Others who care include:
However unsettling, each story stands as more than a cry of distress. The narratives not only expose wrong-doers and bear witness to victims, but also highlight dedicated reformers.
In Lear's housing segment, viewers meet Fred Freiberg, executive director of New York's Fair Housing Justice Center, which flushes out discriminatory housing practices, then sues the offenders. It is Freiberg's agency that dispatches Lear and his African-American counterpart on their landlord-busting mission.
"With every story, we tried to show causes of inequality and the impacts of inequality, but we also tried to provide models of social action," says Solly Granatstein, a creator of the "America Divided" series. "We try to show that there are solutions and there is work being done, that it's not just simply a problem."
For the series, Granatstein, a nine-time Emmy-winning former producer at ABC News, NBC News and CBS' "60 Minutes," joined forces with Richard Rowley, whose credits include the 2013 Oscar-nominated documentary "Dirty Wars," and Lucian Read, with whom Granatstein teamed on their previous docuseries, "Years of Living Dangerously," which addressed the threat of climate change. (Their Divided Films produced the series in association with RadicalMedia.)
For this new venture, the trio set out to look at what Granatstein calls "the OTHER existential threat to our society and culture."
For this, they enlisted Lear, drawing on his show-business gravitas and his history of social activism. Common, too, signed on as a correspondent-executive producer, while TV hitmaker Shonda Rhimes ("Grey's Anatomy" and "Scandal") came aboard as a behind-the-scenes exec producer.
Then the task began to settle on stories and recruit star-correspondents to report them.
"There's no shortage of stories that we could have done," says Granatstein with a wan smile. "But we were looking for geographical and demographic diversity, and where there were heroic individuals and groups who were struggling to heal the divide, whatever that divide might be."
The project, in the works for more than two years, was timed to air during the home stretch of this election season, when issues from the series might help inform the campaign dialogue.
"If you get people attuned to these issues," said Granatstein, "then, eventually, there could be a whole societal shift."
It's a long slog, noted Lear, whose own crusade to stir the public reaches back to his socially conscious sitcoms like "All in the Family" nearly a half-century ago.
"But I don't want to wake up the morning I don't have hope," he declared. Boasting 34,000-plus mornings and counting, Lear persists among the hopeful on "America Divided."